The opportunity to personalize features in a mobile vehicle is ever increasing as the automobile is being transformed into a communications and entertainment platform as well as a transportation platform. Projections are that by 2006 a majority of new American cars will be installed with some type of telematics unit to provide wireless communication and location-based services. These services may be accessed through interfaces such as voice-recognition computer applications, touch-screen computer displays, computer keyboards, or a series of buttons on the dashboard or console of a vehicle.
Currently, telematics service call centers, in-vehicle compact disk (CD) or digital video display (DVD) media, web portals, and voice-enabled phone portals provide various types of location services, including driving directions, stolen vehicle tracking, traffic information, weather reports, restaurant guides, ski reports, road condition information, accident updates, street routing, landmark guides, and business finders.
For example, traffic and driving directions may be accessed through a voice portal that uses incoming number identification to generate location information based on the area code or prefix of the phone number, or to access location information stored in a user's profile associated with the phone number. Users may be prompted to enter more details through a voice interface. Other examples are web and wireless portals that offer location-based services such as maps and driving directions where the user enters both a start and end addresses. Some of these services may have a voice interface.
The location-based services described above and current telematics services available in vehicles do not provide a way by which location information can be relayed to a telematics service subscriber so that the subscriber may automatically receive driving directions from the current location of a vehicle to the location indicated by location information sent with a message or content item sent by a call center.
Drivers would benefit from a system and method that can provide location services based on the current position of the vehicle and the location data related to a message sent from Internet-enabled devices, or related to content items such as news stories accessed from a telematics service provider. One telematics service subscriber would be able to communicate with another telematics service subscriber about a specific location of interest and have the system provide the second subscriber with not only an address, but also the directions to that address from the vehicle's current location. A person who needs to give directions to a driver would benefit from being able to send messages to one or more telematics service subscribers with location information for an event such as a meeting, and when the messages are received, the telematics service could provide driving directions to that specific location from the current position of each driver without additional input. Additionally, such a method might invoke services based on locations associated with personal information from computerized calendars or contacts lists, resulting in greater convenience, productivity, and synchronization with other computer tools.
It is an object of this invention, therefore, to provide a system and method for location-based services to a telematics service subscriber, such that location information can be shared with and be made available to other drivers, users of telematics services, electronic calendars and personal organizers, while overcoming the challenges and obstacles described above.